Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

by John W. Dower

If one of the offspring of shattering defeat was the kyodatsu condition of exhaustion, and another a heartfelt hope for “peace” and “democracy,” a third was the notion of making revolution as Marxists had long spoken of it—from below with the guidance of an enlightened vanguard. This could be done, it was argued, without violence and bloodshed. The challenge was to turn the conqueror’s democratic revolution peacably into a socialist one.

In the chaos of the war’s end, early reforms such as the release of political prisoners, legalization of the Communist Party, and introduction of strong prolabor legislation such as the Trade Union Law of December 1945 had virtually guaranteed the emergence of movements more radical than the victors anticipated or desired. Free to organize, Socialists and Communists moved rapidly onto the political stage. Free to unionize, bargain collectively, and strike, workers did so with astonishing speed and vigor. Both radical and moderate Socialists attracted substantial support among voters and in the labor movement; the newly reconstituted Communist Party commanded immense media attention and made even stronger initial inroads into the ranks of organized labor.

While still on the train between Hakata, his port of arrival, and Tokyo, Nosaka made an instantly famous statement about creating a “lovable Communist Party,” a label that struck some observers as an astounding oxymoron but proved extremely seductive to others.

Even though Nosaka and four other party members were elected to the Diet in the general elections of April 1946, the Communist Party’s greatest influence lay not in parliamentary politics but in organizing labor and mobilizing mass protest. Fierce struggles took place among the Communists and the radical and moderate Socialists before the party succeeded in asserting its control over roughly two-thirds of organized labor. This was a signal accomplishment, given the rapid growth of the union movement. By the end of 1945, unions claimed some 380,000 members. A month later, over one million workers had been added to this number. The number of organized workers rose to around 5.6 million by the end of 1946 and peaked at some 6.7 million in mid-1948, comprising by that date more than half of the nonagricultural work force.2

The baseline for such rapid unionization had actually been established during the war years when workers were organized at company, industry, and national levels as part of the mobilization for “total” war. Once the wartime raison d’être for patriotic service had been destroyed, these existing unions and national federations proved easily mobilized by the political left.

Women were to go to the polls for the first time, and voters confronted some 2,770 candidates representing no less than 363 political parties. Hundreds of old-guard politicians having been purged, 95 percent of these candidates had never before held public office, although slightly over half were affiliated with one of the five major parties.

A delegation of thirteen individuals, led by Tokuda Kyūichi, was finally permitted to enter the residence and submit its demands, but Shidehara himself did not meet with them until the following afternoon. At one point in that meeting, Tokuda told the prime minister that he was so fat he could not possibly be living within the 500-yen limit on monthly income imposed on the nation by the government. The protesters’ rhetoric became so abusive that the frightened, elderly premier eventually fled the room.8

On May 1, rallies occurred in major cities nationwide. Police put the total number of participants at 1.25 million, but more sympathetic sources placed it at twice that number. The turnout in Tokyo was stunning, with as many as half a million men, women, and children flooding into the plaza before the imperial palace. The previous day, a worker in Yokohama had made a brief notation in his diary: “Yesterday, the emperor’s birthday, was not a holiday, but for tomorrow’s May Day we have the day off. . . . How the world has changed!”

The executive committee that organized the May Day observance presented itself—naively, as it turned out—as acting within the spirit of the Potsdam Proclamation and subsequent Allied policies toward Japan. In a message prepared explicitly for SCAP and the Allied Powers, the organizers began with these words: We express our sincerest appreciation for the measures taken by the Allied Powers to liberate the people, grant freedom, and extend the rights to labor and agricultural groups. Inspired by this, we hope to uproot feudalistic and despotic oppression; establish a popular government, based on the true will of the people never to break the peace of the world again; realize political, economic and social conditions which will not jeopardize the livelihood of the people; and be recognized internationally as a peaceful and democratic nation.

The demonstrations of May 1946 did not go anywhere near this far. There was some disorderly conduct. Both the prime minister’s residence and his dignity suffered a bit of damage. The imperial kitchen was contaminated by the entry of hoi polloi. Although several million individuals ultimately were involved in rallies and protests nationwide, there was no mayhem, no serious violence, no death or serious injury, virtually no destruction of property, and not even a discernible whisper of incitement to revolt. There was not the slightest threat whatsoever to the security or authority of the occupation forces. Nonetheless, on May 20 MacArthur saw fit to warn the Japanese people “that the growing tendency towards mass violence and physical processes of intimidation, under organized leadership, present a grave menace to the future development of Japan.” The supreme commander’s warning went on to condemn “excesses by disorderly minorities”—a phrase that was rendered as bōmin demo in Japanese and carried with it chilling memories of the language in “peace preservation” legislation that SCAP had ordered abrogated only a half year previously. The dictionary definition of bōmin is “mob, rioters, insurgents,” while demo is borrowed English for “demonstration.” With this ominous phrase, the popular turbulence of April and May—full of contradictions but also representing an historic expression of popular defiance of corrupt and inept government—became tarred as a mere step toward mob rule.

the U.S. representative to the four-power Allied Council that met in Tokyo similarly seized the occasion of the May protests to launch an anticommunist campaign simultaneously directed against the Soviet Union and the popular movement, which he intimated were in intimate collusion. Even the message which organizers of the May 1 commemorations had delivered to Allied authorities, he declared with no justification, bore earmarks of having been translated from a “foreign” language. What he meant was that the Russians wrote it—a cavalier, contemptuous, and soon-to-be conventional dismissal of any serious radical expression.16

the most dramatic moment in Japanese working-class history: plans for a general strike that was to commence on February 1, 1947.

When negotiations between labor leaders and the government broke down completely on January 30, the momentum toward a general strike seemed irresistible. Late the following day, General MacArthur intervened to announce that he would not permit “the use of so deadly a social weapon.” With this, the “two-one [February 1] strike” entered the realm of political legend. Conservatives who had merely been jubilant on May 20, when MacArthur condemned “disorderly minorities,” were now ecstatic. Labor leaders wept openly, and the more radical among them now looked upon the United States with bitterness as a duplicitous opponent of any genuine “people’s” democracy.

This new left-wing image of the victor as more hypocrite than liberator was memorably conveyed by Ii Yashirō, the chief coordinator of the strike’s organizing committee, whose account of SCAP’s intervention became an indelible part of postwar labor history. As Ii told the story, he was summoned by General Marquat, the head of GHQ’s Economic and Scientific Section, on January 31 and ordered to sign a statement canceling the strike. He responded by asking: “What kind of democracy is this?” Japan’s unions were democratic, he declared, and decided policy by majority vote. That being the case, he had no authority to cancel the proposed strike. He vainly tried to assure Marquat that the strikers had no intention of impeding occupation activities or food deliveries. At that point, Marquat evidently banged the table in fury and some seven or eight military police spilled into the room brandishing their pistols. Ii, in his own turn, erupted. He asked the Americans why they were threatening violence, and exclaimed: “Japanese workers are not American slaves! Japanese workers are not fools!”

In this, his darkest moment, Ii still managed to convey an impression of integrity and hope. In broadcasting his statement calling off the strike, he embellished on the text approved by Marquat. One must often, he told his labor constituency, take one step back for every two steps forward. He offered a banzai cheer for “workers and farmers.” And, voice hoarse and heavy with emotion, he wept. Photographs of a trenchcoat-clad Ii holding his glasses in one hand and wiping tears from his eyes fixed his anguish in popular memory. Many of his listeners sobbed also. This too became part of the mythic story—“tears of limitless anger,” as later leftwing accounts put it, “that workers instinctively felt toward the Japanese government and Americans.” Some years later, Ii called this the pivotal moment at which it became clear that the American occupation authorities were “deceiving the Japanese people with democracy only at the tip of their tongues.” Although the general election of April 1947 resulted in the formation of a short-lived Socialist-led coalition cabinet and union membership continued to rise, suppression of the general strike marked the beginning of the end of the possibility that labor might be an equal partner in the sharing of “democratic” power.22

“Kempō yori meshi da”—”food before a constitution”—read a typical Communist banner during the popular upheavals of May. Given that hunger and runaway inflation threatened to squeeze the life out of ordinary people, this emphasis may have been understandable. It did not, however, reflect an impressive commitment to institutionalizing political democracy. Consistent with its prewar position, the party tended to focus more on the elimination of “feudal vestiges” or the “reactionary government” than on the creation and extension of rights and protections. Internally as well as publicly, it was hardly a champion of divergent views. That such a group anointed itself the vanguard of the movement for a genuine people’s democracy ultimately undermined the emergence of a truly effective, broad-based democratic coalition.

Early on, GHQ began compiling internal lists of undesirable “Reds” in public life, and these lists quickly became catholic in their embrace. In the summer of 1948, MacArthur reversed occupation labor policy by withdrawing the right to strike from public employees, who commonly were in the vanguard where miserable pay, layoffs, and radical unionism were concerned.

By 1949, “Red purge” had become one of the fashionable new terms of the occupation, appropriately expressed in Japanized English (reddo pāji). Initially referred to within GHQ simply as a “troublemaker purge,” the Red purge involved close collaboration among occupation officials, conservative politicians, government bureaucrats, and corporate managers. A major objective was to break radical unions at the company and industry level, and to this end some eleven thousand activist union members in the public sector were fired between the end of 1949 and the outbreak of the Korean War on June 25, 1950. After the war began, the purge was extended to the private sector (including the mass media), resulting in the dismissal of an additional ten to eleven thousand leftist employees by the end of 1950.

Following severe open criticism from the Kremlin-controlled Cominform in January 1950, Nosaka personally was forced to eat humble pie for the “lovable JCP” policy he had promoted, and the party was thrown into turmoil. On May 18, the central committee issued (with Politburo approval) a militant fifty-two page “thesis” that hostile chroniclers aptly characterized as constituting “the last rites for the ‘lovable Communist Party.’” For the Communists and radicals, the aftermath of these developments was swift and disastrous.

On June 6, MacArthur ordered the government to “remove and exclude from public service” all twenty-four members of the party’s central committee; the next day he extended this purge to seventeen top editors of the party newspaper.

Despite its ultimate marginalization, the left contributed in major and enduring ways to defining the contours of democratization. As in much of Western Europe, Marxism in various versions became established as an integral part of political thought and activism, and radical or heterodox concepts became a familiar part of everyday life. Given their dynamic successes in mobilizing mass demonstrations, labor and the left established themselves as forces that, however weakened, still had to be accommodated. Economically, one result was the emergence of a style of capitalism that differed in significant ways from the American model.

Although the “reverse course” helped establish a domestic conservative hegemony of politicians, bureaucrats, and businessmen that remained dominant to the end of the century, Communists and Socialists continued to be elected to the Diet and to command serious attention in debates over public policy. They became the country’s most articulate critics of acquiescence in U.S. Cold War policy—and (no small irony) the staunchest defenders, for decades to come, of the initial occupation ideals of demilitarization and democratization.

Every soldier went to battle carrying the pocket-size Senjinkun or Field Service Code, whose opening sentence was this: “The battlefield is where the Imperial Army, acting under the Imperial command, displays its true character, conquering whenever it attacks, winning whenever it engages in combat, in order to spread the Imperial Way far and wide so that the enemy may look up in awe to the august virtues of His Majesty.” In Shinmin no Michi (The Way of the Subject), a major tract issued four months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the government’s ideologues dwelled on the direct descent of the emperor from the sun goddess Amaterasu and characterized the national polity as a “theocracy” in which “the way of the subject is to be loyal to the Emperor in disregard of self, thereby supporting the Imperial Throne coextensive with the Heavens and with the Earth.” Filial piety and loyalty were the supreme virtues of the imperial state, and Shinmin no Michi was at pains to denounce the “individualism, liberalism, utilitarianism, and materialism” that imperiled those virtues. Emperor Hirohito was sacrosanct. His war was holy. The virtues he embodied were unique and immutable.

The emperor’s role in Japan’s aggression was never seriously investigated. He was dissuaded by the Americans from acknowledging even moral responsibility for the repression and violence that had been carried out in his name and with his endorsement. When members of the imperial entourage raised the possibility of his abdication, SCAP opposed this emphatically. Indeed, the occupation authorities chose not merely to detach the emperor from his holy war, but to resituate him as the center of their new democracy.

if the nation’s supreme secular and spiritual authority bore no responsibility for recent events, why should his ordinary subjects be expected to engage in self-reflection?

Hereditary privilege was reaffirmed by the “symbol” sovereign, who simultaneously remained his country’s preeminent emblem of patriarchal authority. Although empresses had reigned in earlier times, the victors allowed the monarchy to retain its modern tradition of permitting only males to succeed to the throne. In addition, the emperor remained the incarnation of a putative racial purity as well as cultural homogeneity.

Harmony and hierarchy were valued over contention and individuality, and the new symbol-emperor still embodied the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century invention of a “Yamato” identity that excluded Koreans, Formosans, Chinese, Caucasians—aliens of whatever ethnic origin—from becoming “Japanese.” Despite the formal separation of church and state, the emperor also remained high priest of the indigenous Shinto religion, conducting esoteric rites in the palace and reporting to his divine ancestors at the great Ise shrine. All of this left him as the supreme icon of genetic separateness and blood nationalism, the embodiment of an imagined timeless essence that set the Japanese apart from—and superior to—other peoples and cultures.

and so the “Shōwa” era, which began with Hirohito’s ascension to the throne in 1926, carried on unbroken, a calendrical declaration of fundamental continuity with the past.2 The Shōwa era lasted until 1989, when the former “manifest deity” of the prewar ideologues finally passed away at the age of eighty-nine. In the Japanese manner of recording time, the emperor died in the sixty-fourth year of Shōwa, the period of occupation (“Shōwa 20” to “Shōwa 27”) but a momentary interlude in his reign.

In his memoirs, Yoshida Shigeru praised MacArthur as the “great benefactor” of his country, referring not to the gift of democracy (which Yoshida regarded with grave reservations) but to the supreme commander’s preservation of the throne and protection of its august occupant in a time of unprecedented peril.

As a basic rule, MacArthur’s propaganda specialists observed a wartime policy of not provoking the enemy by attacking the emperor.

Although the stated rationale for such restraint was that the Japanese regarded their sovereign with religious awe and would be even more inclined to fight to the death if he were attacked, other considerations were at work. As an internal report by the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) noted in July 1944, “the desirability of eliminating the present Emperor is questionable; it is probable that he inclines personally toward the more moderate faction and might prove a useful influence later.”

The task, as Fellers and his men put it, was to “drive a wedge” between the military leadership and the emperor (with his subjects) by persuading the Japanese that “gangster militarists” had not only duped them but betrayed their sacred leader. The Western propagandists, in a word, were ready to take a hand in reimagining an emperor divorced from the policies imperial Japan had pursued in his name, under his authority, and with his active cooperation for almost two decades.

An absolute and unconditional defeat of Japan is the essential ingredient for a lasting peace in the Orient. Only through complete military disaster and the resultant chaos can the Japanese people be disillusioned from their fanatical indoctrination that they are the superior people, destined to be the overlords of Asia.

To the masses will come the realization that the gangster militarists have betrayed their sacred Emperor. They have led the Son of Heaven, Divine Ruler of the Empire, to the very precipice of destruction. Those who deceive the Emperor cannot exist in Japan. When this moment of realization arrives, the conservative, tolerant element of Japan which has long been driven underground possibly may come into its own.

There must be no weakness in the peace terms. However, to dethrone, or hang, the Emperor would cause a tremendous and violent reaction from all Japanese. Hanging of the Emperor to them would be comparable to the crucifixion of Christ to us. All would fight to die like ants. The position of the gangster militarists would be strengthened immeasurably. The war would be unduly prolonged; our losses heavier than otherwise would be necessary.

There are those among us who advocate slaughter of all Japanese, a virtual extermination of the race. The Asiatic War has brought so much suffering and taken so many lives that no fate seems too awful for the Japanese.

America must lead, not follow events. At the proper time we should permit the driving of a wedge between the Emperor and the people on the one hand, and the Tokyo gangster militarists on the other.

This respectful appraisal of the emperor’s benign potential and virtually totalitarian “spiritual” control over the Japanese psyche would become the bedrock of postwar policy.

By then, Fellers and his staff had compressed “Japanese behavior patterns” that could be exploited by the Allies into a fifteen-point mantra: “inferiority complex, credulousness, regimented thought, tendency to misrepresent, self-dramatization, strong sense of responsibility, super-aggressiveness, brutality, inflexibility, tradition of self-destruction, superstition, face-saving tendency, intense emotionality, attachment to home and family, and Emperor worship.”

The Manila conference did not linger on the emperor per se, but among the propaganda slogans proposed was “Give the Emperor back to the people.” A “wedge” policy was agreed upon, as was the idea of using the emperor “to further our aims” at a “proper time.”

“It would be the height of folly to kill the Emperor who is merely the product of 2,500 years of biological ungodliness (inbreeding). You cannot remove their Emperor worship from these people by killing the Emperor (who is only a part of the family ancestor worship system) any more than you remove the godhead of Jesus and have any Christianity left.”

Where the U.S. saturation bombing of Japanese cities was concerned, however, his condemnation was unqualified. In an internal memorandum dated June 17, 1945, Fellers described this as “one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in all history.”17 As the war in Asia drew to its terrible denouement, he also forth-rightly characterized it as a race war. “The war in Europe was both political and social,” he wrote one week before surrender, whereas “the war in the Pacific was racial.” In planning for peace, it was imperative to recognize that “the white man as overlord of the Orient is finished.” “The American position in the Orient cannot be founded upon the theory of white supremacy,” he insisted. “The Oriental must be placed on the basis of absolute equality with our people. . . . There must be no taboo because of race.”

Addressing the opening session of the eighty-eighth Imperial Diet on September 4, Higashikuni lavished praise on the emperor for having paved the way “for the establishment of an eternal peace in order to save the people from hardships.” “We deeply regret,” the prime minister exclaimed, “to have caused Him so much anxiety.”21 An alien from another planet listening to these speeches might easily have concluded that Emperor Hirohito had ascended the throne in August 1945, just in time to end a terrible war, and that no one’s feelings other than his mattered.

The mistakes of the recent past had occurred because the identity between the emperor’s heart and the people’s heart had been lost after the Meiji period, when the military succeeded in inserting itself between the sovereign and his subjects.

There was, of course, an implausible aura to all this, as if the antidemocratic rhetoric of “The Way of the Subject” that the emperor’s loyal servants had been spouting only yesterday had been no more than a slip of the tongue. Had Shigemitsu been so foolhardy as to openly declare that the national polity was compatible with Western-style democracy one month earlier, in all likelihood he would have been jailed (or committed to a mental institution); and in all likelihood the emperor would have observed his disappearance in silence, just as he had the repression of other critics of the policies and orthodoxies proclaimed in his name.

On September 3, Shigemitsu acted out his renewed vow to shield the throne by conveying the thesis of imperial innocence and militarist conspiracy directly to General MacArthur in a private meeting. The foreign minister’s immediate purpose on this occasion was to persuade the supreme commander to abandon plans to administer the country through direct military government. Throughout history, he told the general, “our emperors always have been thoroughly pacifistic,” and Emperor Hirohito was no exception. He had opposed the recent war, been ever diligent in seeking peace, and played a decisive role in ending hostilities.

The Shōwa emperor was not an eloquent man; he had never been socialized to be capable of even normal conversation. He was intelligent, but gave no hint of engaging in self-reflection. His education as heir apparent had been rigorous and inflexible, particularly so, perhaps, because his father, the Taishō emperor, was mentally incompetent. He rarely if ever conveyed self-doubt, but neither did he display overweening arrogance. He was scrupulously, almost compulsively, attentive to detail. There is no evidence that, prior to the defeat, “democracy” was of any genuinely serious interest to him apart from being a threat that might get out of control. There is ample evidence, on the other hand, that he moved pragmatically with the prevailing winds.

The emperor’s lack of self-reflection concerning the war emerged in a rare short letter he wrote on September 9 to his eldest son, the crown prince Akihito, then twelve years old. It might have been expected that such a communication at such a time would have been philosophical as well as practical. There was precedent for such reflection in traditional Japanese writings, but this was not the emperor’s métier. His letter to his son was cryptic and dry. It concerned, just as most official sermonizing then did, not the war itself but rather “the reasons for defeat.” In this most private of communications, at this extraordinary moment, the emperor stressed the ineptitude of his military advisers and made no mention at all of the democratic ideals Shigemitsu had preached about so fervently. Japan lost the war, Hirohito explained, because “our people” took the Americans and British too lightly. The military had overemphasized spirit and neglected science. Whereas the Meiji emperor had been blessed with great generals and admirals, Japanese officers of his own time had failed to grasp the big picture. They knew how to advance but not how to retreat. Had the war continued, the emperor concluded, he could not have protected the “three holy regalia” (the imperial mirror, sword, and jewel), and most of his subjects would have perished. Thus, holding back his tears, he accepted defeat “to preserve the seeds of our people.”

The hallowed mirror, sword, and jewel appear to have obsessed Hirohito not merely as symbols of legitimacy and majesty, but as sacred objects that dated back, as the national foundation myths maintained, to the divine origins of the imperial line. The regalia exemplified the spirit of Japan in the most rarefied sense, and it must be assumed that mention of them, along with the awkwardly phrased reference to the “seeds of our people,” was the emperor’s way of conveying his sense of being the inheritor of a sacred kingship. Never, not even in his heralded “declaration of humanity” four months later, would Emperor Hirohito repudiate his mythic descent from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

Shortly after his father’s broadcast, Akihito dutifully recorded that Japan had lost the war for two fundamental reasons: material backwardness, particularly in science, and individual selfishness. One on one, Japanese were superior to Americans, the earnest young heir apparent noted, but the Americans were superior when it came to working as a group. The key to the future thus lay in developing scientific prowess and learning to work harmoniously as a nation as the Americans did. So much for cultural canards about egoistic Westerners and group-oriented Japanese!27